SYRACUSE  —  St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center is almost ready to start construction on a new, larger Westside Family Health Center that will offer more services for patients.

The new health center is slated for space next to its current location at 216 Seymour St. in Syracuse. It will be 16,000 square feet, up from 4,000 square feet in the current center.

Plans call for including family medicine and mental health-care services in the new center, as well as boosting its pediatrics and obstetrics capabilities. Work should start this month and wrap up in about a year.

“The intent of this project is to consolidate not only the physical aspect of care, but also the mental-health aspect to the new site,” says Marylin Galimi, director of engineering and construction at St. Joseph’s. “We’re trying to keep it in the same area, so we’re providing the services for the same neighborhood. We’re not relocating it to another part of the city.”

St. Joseph’s originally intended to consolidate clinical services from the Westside Family Health Center in its mental-health services building at 742 James St. The state awarded it a $6.6 million HEAL NY grant for that purpose in 2008. But the hospital changed its plans, working with the state to modify the grant in order to build a new center with more services on Syracuse’s Westside.

“It’s [about] getting closer to the people that are using it, but also being able to address all of the issues in one location, helping them get care where they’re located in one place,” Galimi says.

The expanded center will have 12 health-care providers, including family-medicine physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, an obstetrician, a pediatrician, and a counselor. That’s up from three at the current facility, which has two family-medicine physicians and a physician assistant.

Many of the additions will be obstetrics workers from the St. Joseph’s maternal child-health center, which is set to close and send its workers to the hospital’s family medicine centers when the Westside Family Health Center opens. St. Joseph’s will also perform some hiring at the center on the Westside, although it does not yet have a target number of employees it will add.

St. Joseph’s does not have exact estimates for the number of patients the Westside Family Health Center will see in its new building. It received just over 8,000 patient visits in 2011, a number that will likely rise due to the center’s services expanding.

Costs

The new center comes with a total price tag of $4.8 million, set to be financed with the state’s HEAL NY grant. The remainder of the $6.6 million in grant money will go to renovate the St. Joseph’s Family Medicine Center at 101 Union Ave. and its mental-health services building at 742 James St.

Schopfer Architects LLP of Syracuse drew up plans for the new Westside Family Health Center, which will be one story but feature a design that gives St. Joseph’s the option of adding a second floor at a later date. Hayner Hoyt Corp., also of Syracuse, will be the construction manager.

The $4.8 million price tag includes construction, design, equipment, and the cost of purchasing five separate parcels of land for the building. St. Joseph’s set aside about $290,000 to purchase the land next to its current Westside Family Health Center.

The hospital struck deals to acquire the land from two different owners, according to Steve Infanti, Sr., who works as a consultant with St. Joseph’s on its real-estate transactions. They are Samuel DiMaria, owner of DiMaria’s News at 325 Gifford St., and Paul Nojaim of Nojaim Bros. supermarket, which is adjacent to both the current Westside Family Health Center and the future center’s site.

The land set for the new health center currently consists of three buildings that will be demolished, including DiMaria’s News, which will close or relocate, Infanti says.

“Samuel DiMaria is the owner of DiMaria’s,” Infanti says. “He was very much in favor of this project for the benefit of the neighborhood.”

Nojaim Bros. is preparing to undergo its own set of renovations. It plans to add 6,400 square feet of warehouse space to its current 21,200-square-foot building, according to documents filed with Syracuse’s planning commission. The supermarket will also completely remodel its interior, the documents show.

Empire State Development awarded $1 million in aid to the supermarket project as part of the state’s 2011 regional economic development initiative. The project involves St. Joseph’s — Nojaim Bros. plans to offer healthy foods in partnership with the Westside Family Health Center.

“This is a phenomenal opportunity from a public health point of view to bring together food and access to good nutrition at the retail level,” says Thomas Dennison, director of Syracuse University’s Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and associate director of the Central New York Master of Public Health joint program between Syracuse University and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.

The Lerner Center is working on the healthy-food project at Nojaim Bros., according to Dennison. For instance, graduate students are crafting messages to promote good health and good eating. And the center plans to help build a system that will electronically link Westside residents’ food choices to the medical system.

“It’s all by voluntary participation,” Dennison says. “They would essentially have a rewards club, and the food they buy would be ranked and scored. 

“There will be an in-store promotion to help people think about making better choices,” he says. “The next wave of that is to translate that information into clinically meaningful information for the providers at the health center. The information about what you buy in your grocery cart goes over to your office so the physician can see you and say, ‘You have diabetes and hypertension. You shouldn’t be eating that.’ ”                

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com

SYRACUSE  —  Syracuse Behavioral Healthcare’s (SBH) new outpatient mental health and substance-use disorders clinic is now up and running at the Learbury Centre.

The clinic has been open at 401 N. Salina St. since Sept. 20, according to Jeremy Klemanski, SBH president and CEO. The nonprofit organization hosted a grand opening there two weeks later on Oct. 4.

“Reactions have been very positive,” Klemanski says. “Folks love the privacy that the private offices afford. They love the extra group rooms — things can be scheduled more for the convenience of folks that are coming here as opposed to when there’s a room available.”

The clinic’s opening comes after SBH purchased the 55,000-square-foot Learbury Centre from Pietrafesa LLC in March. It paid $2.83 million to acquire the building in a deal brokered by Martin McDermott of Syracuse–based JF Real Estate, then started $1.2 million in renovations to outfit 17,000 square feet of the facility to host outpatients.

Syracuse–based Hueber-Breuer Construction Co., Inc. performed the work, and Associated Architects of Syracuse designed the renovations. Crews built medical suites, an observation room, counselor-client work space, and a children’s resource room to host children whose parents visit for treatment.

“Parents are thrilled with the child resource space,” Klemanski says. “It really gives us a quality environment for children to be safe while their parents are receiving services.”

SBH funded the purchase of the building and its clinic renovations using its own cash and financing from Alliance Bank, N.A. SBH footed 20 percent of the total $4 million in costs with its cash and relied on Alliance Bank’s financing for the rest of its funding.

The organization hired 10 new staff members to fill positions for the expanded outpatient mental-health clinic. That brings the total number of employees at the clinic to 50. SBH employs a total of more than 220 people.

SBH projects $12.82 million in revenue for 2012. That’s an increase from budgeted revenue of $12.21 million in 2011.

The outpatient clinic isn’t the only SBH operation slated to move to the Learbury Centre. The nonprofit organization will
relocate several of its offices that currently take up 10,500 square feet in the Regency Tower at 770 James St. to the Salina Street facility. The offices will fill 16,000 square feet of space that Empower Federal Credit Union expects to leave next year, according to Klemanski.

“We plan to move into that space,” he says. “Our residential counseling staff will be on the first floor, and our administrative staff will be on the second floor.”

SBH intends to continue leasing out the Learbury Centre’s third and fourth floors.

The nonprofit has some other relocations in store as well. When it moved its outpatient clinic to the Learbury Centre, those operations vacated 10,500 square feet of a 27,400-square-foot building that SBH owns at 847 James St. SBH is now remodeling that building to hold a 25-bed inpatient detoxification center. The James Street facility already holds the 40-bed Willows Inpatient Rehabilitation center and will continue to do so.

Remodeling the building will cost $228,300. Hueber-Breuer is handling that work, which should wrap up in time for the detoxification center to move in around Thanksgiving, Klemanski says. SBH plans to pay for those renovations with its own cash.

They will give SBH a central location for its inpatient services, Klemanski says.

“Having an integrated, fully co-located inpatient detox and rehab is a really rare thing,” he says. “Most communities do not have these kinds of resources, so this is really special.”

The detoxification center will move from 714 Hickory St., where it currently has 18 beds. Once it is gone from that location, SBH intends to spend $187,500 of its own cash to turn the emptied space into four supportive-living apartments. Those apartments will give the organization a block of 13 units between 714 and 720 Hickory St. and are scheduled to be complete by Jan. 1, 2013.

In addition to its operations in Syracuse, SBH also provides services in Rochester. It saw more than 5,700 people in the last year.

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com